Alright here is my honest review. I have been given a one week trial. A
SEO VA called Ian was assigned to me and started working 3 days ago. Today after 3 days I have cancelled the free trial as I am not happy with the work Ian has supplied me.
First of all I was told that the
SEO VAs were trained in Keyword Research. I gave Ian a simple research task. I asked him twice whether he understood everything and he said yes. At the end of the day I was given a report and it turned out that Ian did not know the difference between EXACT and BROAD searches. This then ended up in the report being worthless and 8 hours being wasted.
If you tell people that the
SEO VAs are trained in keyword research then you should train them well enough that they know the difference between those two.
Alright I've showed him the difference and let him wor kon that research for 2 days. The combined keywords of those two days he came up with I could have personally done in 3 to 4 hours. So the speed was very low.
Hence I decided to give Ian a different task. I asked him to search google for certain keywords and record the name, postal address, email address and phone number of the businesses ranking on certain sides (so that I could easily contact them later to sell
SEO services and advertising to them).
To say things short, his report was a total mess. Absolutely not what I had asked for or expected. I am not going to waste any more of my time to try to teach him the easiest things. His Excel Skills and his presentation skills are also horrible. These were very simple tasks and he wasn't able to perform them. I don't want to know what would have happened if I had let him loose on the
SEO on my sites.
This however is not 100% indicative of the services of the VAs firstpage is providing. A business partner of mine has also taken up a one week free trial and was given a VA called Airen. As he ended up not having enough time fully use his trial I have given Airen some work to see how she copes in comparision to Ian.
Airen has been delightful to work with. Though she has not always followed my demand to be on skype at all times while she works her work itself has been great. She has been given the same task as Ian, to collect data from google, however hers was slightly harder as she was researching German companies. Her reports were absolutely great and she did a great job on that. She has also been given some very simple link building task which she has done very well. We have kept her one week trial and will most likely keep her after the trial.
So the conclusion of my review: 1 great VA and 1 not so great one. You will have to monitor the VA that will be given to you closely so that you don't end up with one that cannot full-fill your tasks.
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